There Will Never Be Another You...

We're often told that every human being, like every snowflake, is unique. I've never been sure how either assertion has been (or even could be) verified, but I have my doubts about both. A lot of people do seem awfully reminiscent of somebody else and, although it's true my acquaintance with snow down here on the South Coast is limited, snowflakes do all seem to have an uncannily strong family resemblance. Besides, AFAIK we only have the word of pioneer snowflake photographer Wilson A. Bentley to go by, who was self-evidently bonkers. I suppose "unique" may be a question of scale: I expect all hydrogen atoms are unique, too, once you get to know them up close.

There was this song you used to hear a lot in the 1950s and 60s, "There Will Never Be Another You". It became what used to be known as a "standard", a song or tune that was covered by pretty much everybody, from Frank Sinatra on down, including any number of instrumental interpretations; I suppose its melodic structure and chord changes invited the sort of musical mucking about that the arrangers and improvisers of the time loved so much. Lyrically, however, the song is a massive disappointment: it's not a rigorous philosophical or biological investigation into the eternal uniqueness of your particular instantiation of the human genome, just some schmaltzy romantic yearnings for someone's ex. So, now that it has provided a catchy handle for this post we won't be mentioning it again.

The other day, I received a curious email. An artist – a sculptor and painter – in the USA was asking me, "Is this your work?" He had acquired a copy of a semi-abstract photograph of a figure reflected in some wet cobblestones with the title "The Radiance of Opposites, Prague C.R.", and signed "Michael Chisholm 96". Now that, as I am constantly being reminded, is my name, although I generally go by "Mike", and although I have been known to take photographs of that sort, I have never yet been to Prague, despite it being the home town of my man Franz Kafka.

Now, I think we will all, at some time, have been given cause to wonder whether we have indeed been responsible for something we had either completely forgotten about, or never actually done. The experience probably has a name ("Kafka-esque" springs to mind). I have often awoken from troubled dreams, not to discover that I have been transformed into a gigantic cockroach, thankfully, but nonetheless confused as to whether I have or have not, at some time in the past, committed a murder or some other appalling crime that had somehow slipped my memory. Only to realise with immense relief that – phew! – it was all just a dream.

So, looking at this photograph by "Michael Chisholm", I briefly experienced that troubling sensation of self-doubt: no, wait, is it one of mine? It does look eerily like some transparencies I took in northern Spain around 1990... Have I, in fact, been to Prague, and somehow forgotten? But, um, no: not mine, never been there, not guilty.

A little searching on the Web revealed that although there may never be another me, as such, there is no shortage of alternative candidates. There are actually quite a lot of Michael Chisholms out there, mainly Canadians, not a few of whom are photographers or artists. It's a little disturbing. But a bit more searching narrowed it down to one prime suspect: the late Michael Chisholm of Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose book of photographs taken in Prague, Bridging East and West, bears the exact same photograph as the one in question on its cover. Busted! Whether this is the same Canadian Michael Chisholm as the author of Around the Bend: the whimsical world of Michael Chisholm ("112 pages of Chisholm's lawn art, folk art, lawn dummies & animals") is a known unknown that I'm not inclined to investigate. I really can't be held responsible for every act of idiocy committed in my name.

It all reminds me of the Graham Greene impostor. Do you know that story? In 1954, Greene received a letter from a man who had met him at the Cannes International Film Festival. Problematically, however, Greene had never actually been to the Cannes Festival. Over the years, Greene would keep hearing stories about this other Graham Greene who was passing himself off as the novelist in various locations around the world, and getting into some very Greeneland-ish scrapes, ultimately getting arrested in Assam for gun-running and – hilariously – then trying to get money for bail from Hulton Press, publisher of many of Greene’s magazine pieces.

Eventually, Greene wrote about his troublesome shadow ("The Other … Whom Only Others Know", Daily Telegraph Magazine, Jan. 10, 1975). He tells how, after a meeting with Salvador Allende, then President of Chile, a local newspaper accused him of being his own double. "I found myself momentarily shaken with a metaphysical doubt ... Had I been the impostor all along? Was I the Other?"

He wasn't the first, of course. Doppelgangers and impersonators are the stuff of legend, sensation, and gothic fiction, from Martin Guerre via the Tichborne Claimant to Tom Ripley. I have already exposed Jon Stewart's unnerving duplication as "Hugh Brownstone" (see the post Is It Jon Or Is It Hugh?; I can't believe some of you don't agree with me...), and I can't be the only one to have been spooked by my own appearance out of left field when passing an unexpected mirror. You again!

Then I suppose there's this:

When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he saw was Tigger, sitting in front of the glass and looking at himself.
"Hallo!" said Pooh.
"Hallo!" said Tigger. “I’ve found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them."
A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Sorry about that. I haven't actually read that appalling effusion of whimsy, just watched the Disney version with my kids. When it comes to all things Pooh-related, I'm with Dorothy Parker:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

Now, there may well never be another Dorothy Parker – and if Google and Facebook are any guide, she seems to have taken a patent out on a name you would have thought fairly commonplace – but I think any confidence in one's own uniqueness is easily shaken. Certainly, when it comes to photography, it seems one Michael Chisholm's work is all too easily mistaken for another's. And how quickly might someone trawling the Web, in possession of a vague memory of some earlier draft of the one and only me, be convinced that I had relocated to Canada, gone Around the Bend, and dedicated my life to the creation of lawn art, whatever that is. Or even – noooo! – branded myself as Mike "Chizzy" Chisholm and taken to churning out sub-psychedelia in Detroit? It doesn't bear thinking about. I may yet have to change my name.

A few minutes of anagrammatic experimentation yields Mike Mohlisch... Possible? Or Michael Imholsch? Both names are as singular as stand-offish snowflakes and, until now, completely unknown to Google. The trouble is, these guys don't exist and haven't done anything. Yet... But there is something curiously enticing – liberating, even – about the idea of working under a one-off pseudonym in a world cluttered with namesakes who are busily appropriating, diluting, or polluting your nominal "own brand" with their efforts. It could be fun, and it could happen! Indeed, it may already have happened...

You again!